Examples, Templates, Prompts, and Exercises

When you are the audience for your story, you are free to tell it anyway you like but if you are telling your story for a job or college admissions, you might need to make sure it is structured in a way that communicates to your audience.

So let's examine what colleges are looking for when they are admitting new students to their campuses. We don't have to examine every single college or look at their individual requirements, instead we can put ourselves in their position and we can come up with a much broader strategy that is usable for almost any college.

On some level, colleges need to figure out the answer to two big questions …

“Will you be successful at our school?”

“Are you and this school a good match?”

That is it, mainly.

Sure there are details we are skipping but if you just concentrate on having a good answer for those two questions you will be in good shape.

Colleges are investing in you. They have to decide whether you are worth the investment of their time, their open slot, the commitment they will need to make in you. Their investment in you pays off if you stay for four years (or more) and graduate. For the college, getting you to graduation day is their biggest goal.

They need some confidence that you are capable of graduating. Graduating means that you will need to be successful in and out of class. It means that you will be able to handle the full college environment, that includes being successful in the classroom, fitting in to the cultural of the school, adapting to the change of place, being to handle the financial cost of school, and having the capability of solving your own problems and seeking out help when you need it.

Colleges recognize that getting good grades is only a piece of the puzzle. Success in college requires a broad skill set. Luckily, a Learning Journey is a good way to prepare yourself for success in college.

The second big question has to do with being a good match.

Even if you are capable to being successful, is it the right place for you? Does the college have the kind of programs you are interested in? Will you fit into the college culture? Will you contribute to the college community? Does this college make sense for the next stage of your Learning Journey?

The truth is that you are investing heavily in them, too. You also have to decide if this is a good investment of your time, energy, and money. You should also want to know if you will be successful at this school. You should also want to know if this school is a good match for you.

It sounds kind of simple right?

Let’s start with the first one. Being a successful student.

Can you demonstrate that you can be successful at this college?

You can answer this question in a lot of ways.

Traditionally, one approach a college will take, will be to examine the classes you took, your grade in those classes plus your score on standardized tests.

Numbers can lie. Numbers can tell an incomplete story.

Colleges know that numbers don't tell them everything but sometimes it is the only thing they have to go on.

If you have these kind of numbers, you can use them. There is nothing wrong if you want to share numbers as part of your story.

Maybe you took some classes at a community college or a university and received good grades. That can help show that you are capable of working at the college level. It shows you can be successful in the classroom.

Maybe you have good scores on standardized tests like the SAT or ACT? That can be a part of your story, too. A college admissions counselor might interpret good scores on a standardized test as evidence that you can be successful in the classroom.

But we know that numbers don't tell the whole story. And we know that being successful can be measured in other ways. So whether or not you have numbers to share, there are many other ways to tell your story and show that you can be successful in and out of the classroom.

Maybe your story can demonstrate success because you showed you can overcome obstacles. College is going to be full of unexpected obstacles. Being able to demonstrate that you can adapt, change, adjust, improvise, and persevere is a powerful way to show that you will be successful. It is a story that numbers can't fully tell.

Maybe your story can demonstrate success because you showed you are willing to take chances and challenge yourself. Being successful in college is not about just following a checklist, it requires you to push yourself and challenge yourself. Telling a story that includes evidence that you are not afraid to push yourself is a way of demonstrating that you can be successful.

Success in college requires a bit of confidence. Confidence means knowing yourself, knowing your strengths, knowing when you need to seek out help, knowing what you are capable of. It is hard to demonstrate confidence with numbers. It is much easier to do it with your story.

Successful students don't do it alone. They have communities of support. Colleges know that the most successful students are those that are engaged with others. Can you demonstrate that you will be a successful college student by telling a story about your engagement with various communities of support? Can you show the way that you connected with co-learners, teachers, advisors, parents, friends? The story is yours but it probably includes a bunch of other people. Telling that story is a good way of showing that you will be a successful student at college.

Successful students learn outside the classroom. A lot of what you will learn in college will be outside of the classroom. Can your story demonstrate a learner who doesn't need a formal classroom or teacher to engage with the world? Travel, internships, jobs, volunteering, real world projects, independent research, creating/doing/discovering, these are ways to show that you can be successful in more ways than taking a quiz and following a syllabus.

Successful students have goals and find ways to reach them. But really successful students understand that goals can change. Sometimes reaching a goal might require you to adapt and adjust. Your story can demonstrate that you have experience working towards goals. It probably also includes plenty of times that you had to make adjustments. Your story doesn't need to be a straight line. Most people's life stories are full of unexpected turns, changes of heart, and finding new opportunities. You can demonstrate that you know how to live life as a journey. Colleges know that students change majors, discover new life goals, and encounter unexpected obstacles in the course of their studies. Your story can show that you already know how to do that.

Success in college is more than a numbers game.

By telling your story you are already demonstrating that you understand there are many paths to success and many obstacles to overcome. You are demonstrating that you know that it isn't a numbers game. It is a complex, complicated, adventurous journey. The first step in demonstrating that you can be successful is demonstrating that you understand what success means.

Can you demonstrate that you are a match for this particular college?

The second question you need to answer for the college you are applying to is, are you a good match? Are you, as a person, a good match for them? Are they, as an institution, a good match for you?

It sounds kind of simple but it is an important question for them. It is also an important question for you.

Even if you can demonstrate that you can be successful as a student, they still need to know if it makes sense for you to be a student at this particular school.

Do they have the programs and majors that you want to study?

Is the location and type of school (private/public, large/small, competitive/open, traditional/non-traditional) a match?

Do they have the type of campus, facilities, faculty, extra curriculars, reputation that is a match for your goals and interests?

Do you have any personal experience with this college (you took a class here, you have a relative who is an alumnus, you have visited, you have done your research)?

Do you understand the history, reputation, personality, vision, goals of this college? And do they match your own values and goals?

Are you someone who is going to contribute to making the college a better place? Will you engage with the community? Will you seek out ways to give back? Will you fit in?

For the college, this is a hard question to figure out. The typical numbers like grade point average and standardized tests that they might use to decide if you will be successful don't really tell them much about whether you are a good match.

They can look at your extra curricular activities, what clubs you joined, what leadership opportunities you participated in, what sports you played. They can also read your essay and see if you say the right things. They might have to rely on things that don’t typically show up on your school transcript.

Today’s students and families have learned how to game their extra curriculars and how to craft an essay to say the right things. Students might participate in clubs or volunteer at a not for profit out of a desire to show off for a college not out of true interest or passion.

You will have an advantage because you will have gone on a Learning Journey and have a story to tell about it. Your story will be much harder to game. Your story will not only help answer the question of whether you and the college are a match, your story will help you find a good match in the first place.

As you can probably tell from the questions above, finding a college that is a good match for you can be hard. There are a lot of things to consider. But you have been on a Learning Journey. You have experience making decisions about your Learning Opportunities, about Learning Widely and Learning Deeply, about what Evidence of Learning to capture, about where to go next.

You understand yourself as a learner. You know your strengths. You know how to seek out help. You know how to create your own Learning Opportunities. You know how to put yourself in the best position to be successful. That is what your Learning Journey was all about.

Finding a college that is a good match for you should feel like a natural part of your continuing Learning Journey. Telling a story that shows that you are a good match for that college should also feel like a natural part of telling your story.

At this point in the journey you should be able to say ...

Here is what I want to do next.

Here is why I want to do that.

Here is the evidence that shows why this next step makes sense.

Here is a place that will help me in the next step of my journey.

The question, "are you a match for us and are we a match for you?" should emerge naturally from your Learning Journey. It should flow from your story.

Nuts and bolts. What is your story going to look like? How is it formatted? Is there a template?

Well … everyone's story will look a little different. There aren’t any hard and fast rules. Feel free to tell your story in a way that makes sense for you.

On the other hand, you might find it helpful to look at a format that you can use and adapt.

Whether your story will be in the form of an "official transcript" or as a supplemental to another “official transcript.” You can use the following basic structure.

• Contact Information
• Overview of a Learning Journey and Why You Learned This Way
• Highlights of Your Learning Journey
• List of Completed Learning Opportunities
• List of Formal Learning Opportunities taken at a HS or College
• In Progress and Future Learning Opportunities
• Portfolio or Signature Learning Opportunities
• Overview of Your Future Plans and How Your Learning Journey Prepared You
• Graduation Date
• Signature

You will want to make sure there is a section of required information like your name, contact information, birthdate, graduation date (or expected graduation date).

It might be helpful to have an “Overview” section explaining a little bit about how you approached your high school years. Not everyone will be familiar with all of the ideas in this Field Guide so it might be helpful to explain what it means to be on a Learning Journey, the idea that you are working towards Autonomy, Competence, Confidence, and Connection, how the idea of a Learning Opportunity captures all the various ways you can decide to learn something, how your Learning Journey included Reflecting and capturing Evidence of Learning.

You can’t exactly attach this entire Field Guide to your story but you can include some short explanations to give some context to how you approached your Learning Journey.

There are some templates below to help you.

Your story can include a section that you can think of as “Highlights of My Learning Journey”. This can include information about the personal goal(s) that drove your high school Learning Journey and your personal goals for your college Learning Journey. It can highlight any Signature Learning Opportunities and how they are reflections of who you are. This section can emphasize any Learning Opportunities or Evidence of Learning that helps tell the story you want tell. You can look to any Dive Deeply examples, specific demonstrations of Autonomy, Competence, Confidence, and Connection, or any Evidence of Learning that stands out to you as being good representations of who you are.

This section isn’t meant to be comprehensive, it is meant to be the strongest ways you can answer the questions “will you be successful?” and “are you a good match?”

The next section is where you can be comprehensive. It will include a full listing of “Completed Learning Opportunities”. This will be more of a Explore Widely focus. It will list all of your Learning Opportunities including a title and brief description. You can organize these around any schema you think best tells the story you want to tell. You can organize them around their principle content area. You can organize them chronologically. You could organize them around How you learned. Even though this is a big list of Learning Opportunities, you can organize in a way that continues to tell a good story.

If you completed any Learning Opportunities at a formal institution like a college, high school, etc. You can list them under “Formal Learning Opportunities”. You will also want to send any official transcripts from these institutions. Listing these separately will indicate to them that there are other records to support these Learning Opportunities that they should be on the lookout for.

If you decided to collect any of your Evidence of Learning into a “Digital Portfolio”, you can link to it here or link to any Signature Learning Opportunities that you would like for them to review.

Finally, you can include the date for your expected graduation or the date on which you already graduated.

Finally you can include your name and signature. This is signaling to them that you are the responsible party who is telling this story.

Even with this structure, the reality is that your story doesn't look like a traditional transcript. Sometimes colleges might ask for an explanation or for more details. Don’t take that to mean they won’t read it carefully. They just might need to have some clarification.

Don’t be surprised if some admissions counselors tell you that they enjoyed being able to have a more complete, holistic picture of you. They process a lot of traditional transcripts every year. Yours will be different. That is ok. It is probably to your advantage.

There is a chance you might have to translate your story to something that reads more like a traditional transcript. Many colleges and universities will gladly review a narrative transcript in the form of your story and be able to make an admissions decision on that alone. But if you are in a situation where it is necessary to make your story read more like a traditional transcript, here are some strategies you can use.

In traditional schools, a credit is a rough reflection of the number of hours you spent in a classroom. For high school that typically means that one high school credit is equivalent to a full year in a full-time classroom.

A class that meets 5 days a week for 50 minutes a day for a full year is 1 credit. So in some ways you can think of 1 credit = 1 year.

Some colleges might list a recommended pre-college high school program to potential students. They often represent it in years …

• 4 years of English
• 4 years of Social Studies
• 3 years of Math
• 3 years of Science

That same list could be represented in credits

• 4 credits of English
• 4 credits of Social Studies
• 3 credits of Math
• 3 credits of Science

That is how many high school programs will represent credits. If you only took 1 semester or ½ year of a class, it would be called ½ credit. So for high schools, a credit is usually equivalent to a year of a full time course.

Colleges on the other hand, and sorry if this is confusing but it just is the way it is, use a slightly different system. Colleges call them credit hours (or Carnegie Credits). They have a slightly different formula.

A college credit is a representation of the number of hours the course meets per week during a single semester. So a course that meets three times a week for 50 minutes per class is a 3 credit hour class. A course that meets two times a week for 100 minutes per class is a 4 credit hour class.

A college credit is something close to a measure of the hours per week that a semester long course meets.

If you wanted to translate a college course into a high school course, you typically would say that a semester long college course (3 or 4 credit hours) is roughly equivalent to a year long high school course.

There are lots of details that we are going to skip over and this isn’t true in every high school nor every college but to make our translation simple we will use a formula like this.

• 1 high school credit ≈ 1 year of a high school course
• 3 college credit hours ≈ 3 classroom hours per week of a semester long college course
• 3 or 4 college credit hours ≈ 1 high school credit

You can see from this formula that credits are closely related to time. You can figure out the credits if you can figure out the amount of time spent in a classroom.

In the language this Field Guide, a high school or college credit tells you about When. In particular, it tells you how long something took. If you are describing a Learning Opportunity using When you are talking about things like when it started, when it stopped, total hours spent, what was the regular schedule, etc.

A high school or college credit doesn’t say anything about Who, What, Where, Why, or How. It is mainly a measure of When.

So, if you captured information about When for your Learning Opportunity, you should be able to roughly translate that into credits.

If one of the things you captured was total hours spent or if you could estimate that number, you should be able to describe it using the language of credits.

Just remember, the most important thing is for you to take a Learning Journey, to Explore Widely, to Dive Deeply, to have a have variety of types of Learning Opportunities. Not all of your Learning Opportunities will easily translate into a credit system. This translation is not going to be perfect.

For this part of the translation you are going to be paying attention to the total hours spent and then we will use a formula to calculate how that will translate into a high school credit system.

Let’s think about some examples.

You read a non-fiction book about the Civil Rights movement in 20th Century United States. Total time spent reading and reflecting ≈ 12 hours

You volunteered at a local animal shelter, wrote a Reflection, helped them setup a social media account, took photographs and created graphics for their new social media presence. Total time spent ≈ 120 hours

You spent 30 minutes a day practicing drawing portraits every day for a month. Total time spent ≈ 15 hours

You and a friend visited a local art museum and spent some time researching a few of the artists on display. You interviewed each other as a Reflection. Total time spent ≈ 6 hours

You did a research project on your favorite historical building in your town. You combed through the local history section of the library, found old newspaper stories, a profile of the architect, historical photos, and advertisements for the previous tenants. You organized all of the information into a graphic poster and shared it with the current owner. They were impressed with your work and agreed to hang the poster near the checkout register. Total time spent ≈ 80 hours

Since these Learning Opportunities don’t exactly translate to “1 year of full time class” we will need to instead figure out what “1 year of a full time class” equals in “total time spent.”

A typical high school class seems to run somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 to 160 hours. We will use 120 hours as a rough guide. Just remember that a typical high school class isn’t necessarily 50 minutes of work. We can use 120 hours as a tool but not get too caught up in counting minutes exactly. A rough guide will work just fine.

We can roughly state that 1 year of a full time course ≈ 120 hours of time spent

Using that guide we can come up with the following translation:

• Civil Right Book ≈ 12 hours = .1 credits
• Animal Shelter ≈ 120 hours = 1 credit
• Drawing Practice ≈ 15 hours = .125 credits
• Art Museum ≈ 6 hours = .05 credits
• Local Building Research ≈ 80 hours = .67 credits

You can see that our credit numbers are going to include a fair number of decimal points or fractions. That’s ok because our next step is going to add them up into a few limited categories.

When we talked about Explore Widely we mentioned that one approach is to consider academic subjects as a way of touching on a wide variety of topics. Most colleges are organized around academic subjects. They might have colleges or departments whose focus is Math or Science or Literature or Business or Engineering. There are many subtopics within those disciplines, African American History, Latin American Literature, Horticulture, Accounting, etc.

If we look at the five examples above we can come up with subtopics and academic subjects that describe those Learning Opportunities.

The truth is that a lot of the other What categories have as much or even more value overall than the content area but for the moment we are only going to focus on the content areas to make our point. In a minute we will bring in the other areas.

Just focusing on academic subject areas we can come up with the following…

• Civil Rights Book = History, American History, African American History, 20th Century History, Reading, Writing
• Animal Shelter = Animal Science, Business, Not for Profit, Graphic Design, Communication, Social Media, Photography, Art
• Drawing Practice = Art, Drawing
• Art Museum = Art History, Art
• Local Building Research = History, Local History, Architectural History, Graphic Design, Art

We can already see from this list that there are some overlaps in content area.

The Civil Rights Book, Art Museum, and Local Building Research all have a history element.

The Animal Shelter, Drawing Practice, Art Museum, and Local Building Research all mention art.

The Art Museum and the Local Building Research have both art and history in them.

In a traditional school a course is usually only officially in a single content area. It isn’t usually both art and history. That doesn’t entirely make sense. Afterall, most subjects overlap with other subjects. Why not acknowledge that?

We are going to slightly tweak our language to allow for the reality of cross-disciplinary learning. Instead of saying “4 credits of Social Studies”. We will say “4 credits that involved Social Studies.”

That little tweak will allow us to acknowledge credits that work across subject areas. From our examples we could say,

• “.82 credits that involved Social Studies.”
• “1.8 credits that involved Art.”

Here comes the fun part, because you are still in control of how you tell your story, you can tell a unique story even when you are translating it into more traditional language like credits.

• “1.8 credits that involved Art including 1.67 credits focused on Graphic Design.”

Because you are in charge of telling your story, you can organize the information in such a way as to tell the story that you want to tell. Obviously you should tell a story that is true and accurate but it can still be a story structured in a way that makes it uniquely about you.

In our examples above, you can highlight a focus on Graphic Design and back it up with a record of how many credits you focused on Graphic Design.

So far we have only looked at a small number of credits. By the time you graduate you will have probably completed dozens and dozens of Learning Opportunities. If you did your work recording them and tagging them with Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How data, you should be able to tell a complex story that not only shows what subject areas you concentrated on but also How you learned, Who you learned with, Where you learned, and What habits, skills, and mindsets you focused on during your Learning Journey.

Not only will you have a narrative story to tell, but you will also have a story that can be told in the language of credits.